Lawrence and Colleen Poggenburg, and their son Eddie, 10, and dog Skittle enjoy the living room.

Lawrence and Colleen Poggenburg knew exactly what they wanted in a home.

So much so that when they went house hunting in 2004, Lawrence pounded on the door of a home not yet formally up for sale.

"I couldn't have been more aggressive without being rude," he said.

"He busted his way into the house. He wanted to see if it was a contender," Colleen added.

And it was. They prepared an offer to purchase the home and handed it to the owners just one minute after they had their first open house.

Here's just some of what the couple loved about the Mediterranean/Colonial Revival-style house: original quarter-sawn oak floors, leaded-glass windows and doors, windows and doors with rounded tops, a brick exterior, a green glazed terra cotta hip roof with a flat center, lots of decorative molding, doors with inlaid wood and leaded glass, and a yard that was child- and dog-friendly.

"But one of the biggest things for me was that it also has a three-car attached garage that's heated," said Lawrence, an electrical lineman.

The house, built in 1928 for Frank Hochmuth, is on the National Register of Historic Places and will be featured in this year's Spaces & Traces Tour on May 17.

One of the first things the couple did to the 3,650-square-foot house in the Washington Heights area was to tear out all the carpeting and have the wood floors refinished. They also had some of the woodwork that had been painted stripped by professionals, and they stripped some of it themselves. They also painted some rooms themselves, and had others done by professionals.

"We hired Betsy Peckenpaugh, a Wauwatosa artist, and she helped us select our colors," said Colleen, a physician. "She painted some areas of the home, including the medallions that were antiqued in the living and dining rooms. She also did artwork in the first-floor hallway and faux-painted the first-floor powder room."

They began making changes to their home one room at a time. They learned the history of their home, how it would have looked when it was built, and how it would have been decorated.

But the most dramatic changes they made were to the home's lighting.

Because most of the lighting wasn't original, Lawrence researched what styles would be appropriate for the home. His most impressive purchase was three fixtures from Lightolier, a historic lighting fixture company, that now grace their living room, dining room and foyer.

"They're probably steel and are painted red and green," he said. "They have the original paint. I found them at an antique store that's now closed....Months later I found a matching sconce at a shop in Cedarburg."

After finding those pieces, the couple were inspired to replace the rest of the fixtures. To date they've acquired more than 50.

"It's like a lighting museum in here," Lawrence said, adding that if the house were ever to catch fire, he'd "yank down" the Lightolier pieces and "run out of the house with them."

The couple recently talked about their home while their son Eddie, 10, played with their dog, Skittle.

Q. How is your home laid out?

Lawrence: On the first floor, we have an entryway, foyer, living room, dining room, office, powder room and a kitchen with a butler's pantry. We have a long hallway that runs down the center of the house, and at the back of the house there was a ballroom that we turned into a family room. It has 24 leaded-glass windows and a barrel vaulted-ceiling. (It includes a pingpong table.)

The second floor has three bedrooms, a master bedroom/bathroom and a full bathroom with a nearby shower that was once a janitor's closet. From the second-floor hallway we can access a patio over the garage. We made some updates to it over the years, including the addition of a large street lantern. We also have an attic that we use for storage. We can access the flat roof from there. I built a stairway to get up there.

Q. Tell me about your fireplace.

Colleen: We did a lot of research on it. It was done by Ernest Batchelder of California. He made fireplaces, and we know of two or three just like this one in our area. Our design was No. 45, and it has a pineapple motif in the center. It was like a prefab fireplace. It was never a working fireplace because when this home was built, people didn't want to use fireplaces. Then, if you had money, one way to show it was that you didn't need to use a fireplace to heat your home.

Q. Any interesting restoration stories?

Colleen: The back part of our first-floor hallway originally had ceramic tile that matched the kitchen. There was nothing historic about this tile, and when they put it in, they cut out the original hardwood floor. My brother had salvaged some old flooring, and some of it was from a lumber mill that was here over 100 years ago. He had it in his home for years and never used it. We bought it from him and had it put in the hallway to see how it would look. It was a perfect match to the rest of the house. We have the rest of the pieces and will put them in the kitchen.

Q. Will you do other work in the kitchen?

Colleen: This is the next room we'll redo. Every year we've picked one project. We tried to do the kitchen three times, but we could never figure out how to get modern appliances to fit in here. We had a designer help us with a plan but also got historic books from the library....

The kitchen has an incinerator, a radiator and leaded-glass windows over the sink. We'll keep the cabinets because they're original, but we'll put in a soapstone countertop, and a farmhouse sink. We'll partially gut and rearrange the space.

Q. Did you buy all new furnishings when you moved here?

Colleen: We slowly collected pieces over time. The dining room pieces are more historic....The living room has modern furniture in it, but we tried to pick pieces that would still blend in.

Q. What's in your basement?

Lawrence: That area may have once been living space. We think there were three sleeping rooms down there. They weren't bedrooms, because there are no closets in them. Now the basement has a movie theater and bar.... We turned the sleeping rooms into a workout room, a workroom for me and a storage room. The laundry room is also down there, and we'll redo that one day.

Do you, or does someone you know, have a cool, funky or exquisite living space that you'd like to see featured in At Home? Contact Entree home and garden editor Tina Maples at (414) 223-5500 or email tmaples@journalsentinel.com.

Spaces & Traces Tour: Washington Heights Neighborhood

When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 17. Tour includes a 1 p.m. talk, "A History of Washington Heights," by historian John Gurda.

Tickets: $20 for HMI members at the Historic Milwaukee Inc. office, 207 E. Michigan St., Suite 500, and at the website below; $25 for nonmembers. Tickets also available at Colectivo locations, Winkie's in Whitefish Bay and Samara Home & Garden. Day of tour tickets $25 and $30 at St. James Church, 2028 N. 60th St., where preordered tickets will also be available.

Lovely house, Larry & Colleen! I'm glad I got to see it in person and glad it's finally getting some of the attention it deserves. (Although I am a bit concerned that your dance floor is covered by a ping-pong table and couch ;-)

This is a very special house and I am so happy it is being loved the way my family loved it. It was a wonderful home to grow up in with my many brothers and sisters and I have only happy memories (okay, well maybe not so much of raking the lawn...). Thank you for taking such good care of it. Susan Boehme

Tasteless garbage. Hard to do with such good bones. Someone should try and learn what California Mission is if they want to learn how to decorate with a Batchelder fireplace: a hugely desirable feature is anything from that company in your house in California.